The Wire, Week Eight: Does Not Compute!

A Wire-watching buddy tells me, “Man, I’d never teach in a city school. The eighth graders can’t even do fractions!” When I ask him why he thinks that is, he cites the usual litany of family and neighborhood challenges kids face in West Baltimore, the ones portrayed so vividly and heartbreakingly in The Wire itself. But the scene my friend was referring to illustrated what the real culprit is: Our schools often do a terrible job teaching math. When one of Prez’s students says he can’t complete the fractions worksheet because “we never did one-thirds,” Prez responds, “One-fourth, one-fifth, one-third: Follow the same steps.” He’s right in one sense: Certain steps will produce correct answers. But he’s doing nothing to address the much larger problem: Many of his students clearly have no grasp of what fractions are or what “doing arithmetic” with them really means. They've studied a set of steps, but they don't understand how those steps apply to different denominators or problems that don't involve food items.

To illustrate, let’s assume they were dividing fractions, e.g. problems like “10 / ½ =”. Most of the kids might recall from studying division by whole numbers that when you divide, you get a smaller number. Their elementary school teachers might even have encouraged them to check their work by looking to make sure their answer is smaller than the number they started with. But when you divide by a fraction, you get a bigger number, in this case 20. Instead of working with students to help them understand why, many teachers simply drill them in a rote, two-step procedure for dividing by fractions: “invert and multiply.” Students are asked to memorize the word “invert” and told that it means “to flip,” and then asked to memorize and practice those two steps. Sure, that produces the correct answer, but simply memorizing a procedure does little to develop real mathematical understanding. They’ve simply been drilled to follow a seemingly arbitrary set of steps that produces a counterintuitive result. No wonder they’re confused!

Math doesn’t have to be taught that way. In 1999 a young researcher named Liping Ma published a book that caused a huge stir in math education circles (though, sadly, very little buzz in the education policy arena). She found that Chinese teachers help their elementary students develop a much deeper conceptual understanding of math and offer them a broader repertoire of strategies for solving problems than do their American counterparts. That's partly because American teachers themselves tend to have a much shallower grasp of math concepts than Chinese teachers, despite spending more years in formal education to become a teacher. In fact, fewer than half of the American teachers in Ma’s study fully and accurately answered the problem “1¾ / ½ =”. It wasn't simply a matter of forgetting the steps but also a lack of conceptual understanding about what it means to divide by a fraction. Some teachers told her they divided 1¾ by 2 because they understood the problem as asking them to “divide something in half” rather than to figure out, say, how many halves there are in 1¾. One teacher admitted, “I can't really think of what dividing by a half means.” (Ma’s sample included only 21 American teachers, but others who have replicated her research with a larger numbers of teachers have found similar results.)

Ma’s book also sheds light on another perceptive element of that Wire scene. She found that poor conceptual understanding made it difficult for many American teachers to find helpful and accurate ways to represent fractions. U.S. teachers mainly used either food or money to represent fractions, while “those used by the Chinese teachers were much more diverse” and included many examples students would be familiar with from their daily lives, “such as what happens in a farm, in a factory, in a family, etc.” Recall that another of Prez’s students tells him she can’t do the fractions problems on the worksheet because they involve cars: “All that stuff we did in practice was about food!” Again, Prez's response isn't very helpful. He tells her it doesn't matter and to just “pay attention to the number.” Huh?

Such difficulties are not limited merely to teaching fractions in the upper elementary and middle grades; Ma documents how poor conceptual understanding can impede instruction in something as simple as subtracting two-digit whole numbers (e.g., 53 - 26 =). In fact, a hugely important study published last year (also summarized and discussed here) by several University of Michigan researchers found that teachers’ mathematical knowledge has a big impact on how much their students learn over the course of a year—even at the first grade level. They also documented that disadvantaged students—particularly minority youngsters—are more likely to have teachers with lower levels of mathematical knowledge and understanding, a finding they call “shameful.”

Although the full breadth of this problem and its implications have been largely ignored in policy circles, that might change soon. Liping Ma and Deborah Lowenberg Ball, one of the U. Michigan researchers, are both serving on the new, high-profile National Mathematics Advisory Panel. But getting traction won't be easy: This is an uncomfortable topic for many people, including teachers, who sometimes feel it amounts to “teacher bashing.”* Let's be clear: It’s the system that should come under fire. Teachers are themselves the products of the same shallow elementary math instruction they pass on to their students, and deficiencies in their mathematical understanding seldom get addressed later on, either during their time in ed schools or after they start teaching. In contrast, Ma says that Chinese teachers get lots of opportunities to build their math knowledge over the course of their careers. The good news? Another study by Ball demonstrated that “teachers can learn math for elementary school teaching in the context of a single professional development program.”

Of course, that would require a system that works thoughtfully to nurture knowledge and cultivate capacity. Ironically, says The Wire, Marlo and his colleagues are much better at doing those things in the system they run!

* Ball and a colleague discussed some of the negative feedback they’ve received for even conducting such research (e.g., testing teachers for research purposes is inherently wrong because it “de-professionalizes” them, etc.) in a must-read article for American Educator, the excellent magazine published by the American Federation of Teachers, last year.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Virtual Schools=Mainstream Reform?

I just returned from Plano, TX, where I spent the past three days with virtual school teachers, researchers, and program managers at the North American Council for Online Learning Virtual School Symposium. Virtual schools take a variety of forms, from district- or state-led schools that are primarily or entirely supplemental—offering students the option of taking one or more courses to supplement their traditional school experience—to fully online "cyber" schools.

I returned to Washington convinced that the growth in K-12 virtual schooling is even more dramatic than our recent Chart You Can Trust on state virtual schools detailed. And, I learned that growth is not the only reason that we need to pay attention.

Most interesting was the subtext underlying both the formal presentations and my informal conversations. If you think that virtual schooling is just about learning online, you've missed the real potential impact. While not explicit, it is clear that the technology is only a means that offers an opportunity to start from scratch and re-think many traditional assumptions. The end goal is school reform. Two anecdotes:

• In separate conversations with representatives from two different state-based programs, I learned how state-led virtual programs are exposing wide gaps in expectations for learning within a state. These program managers explained how students that were at the top of their class in their local schools were overmatched in courses at the statewide virtual school. It's hard to imagine a more concrete (and sad) example of accountability than when the virtual school teacher has to explain to the student and his/her parents that their ace student is woefully under prepared.


• Former classroom teachers, now managing one state's program, talked about the "culture change" required to teach in that state's virtual school: "In the online world, what they [the teachers] do is more transparent. There is an expectation that you can and will be observed....We will evaluate you....There is a quantitative goal for student achievement." Likewise, in the same presentation, a detailed program for initial online teacher preparation, mentoring, and professional development was also in place.

Many people have compared the virtual school movement to the charter school movement at a similar stage. While I was not involved in the early charter school movement, I can see parallels: The majority of persons I met this week were education entrepreneurs; there are fully-online "cyber" charter schools; and competition for funding is an issue. One lesson that the more experienced virtual school leaders understand is the critical need at this early stage to rigorously protect quality so that the field is not defined by its bad apples. Even the most ardent proponents concede that virtual schooling is still the "wild, wild, West."

But, there are also key differences that could allow the virtual schools to reach a higher level of impact than charters. While reaching scale is still difficult, it is much more possible in the virtual environment—Florida Virtual School may already offer more students classes than any charter management organization. And, choice can consist of a mouse click rather than a new school in a new place (and, as noted above, the comparison is very evident). Finally, the people leading and teaching in many of these programs are public school classroom veterans. And many of the new institutions are actually state- or district-run. These entrepreneurs have found a niche within the system. They are the ones talking about culture change—not union foes or voucher proponents. Very interesting.

Election Miscellany

Yesterday turned out to be an even bigger day than lots of pundits expected, with Democrats picking up 28 seats for a majority in the House of Representatives and a good chance at a majority in the Senate, too, if two races still in the balance come down the way it looks like they're going to. Dems also picked up 6 governorships. (btw, Mike Antonnucci is funny in re: wrong election predictions) DCEdublog has results for the D.C. races I mentioned Monday. Edspresso's got a run-down of races around the country they felt were particularly relevant to education. Ed at NCLBlog proclaims the defeat of all three state TABOR initiatives (but cut it out with the midwest-mocking, already!). CNN's got results for all races here.

Andy and Alexander Russo say the implications for education aren't much to talk about. I agree: a George Miller-led Ed-Workforce committee isn't going to eviscerate NCLB. Apparently Edspresso's Ryan Boots didn't get the message, though.

And, Joe Williams wonders why we close schools on election day. In D.C., at least, we didn't--yesterday was a school day for DCPS students. But most D.C. polling places aren't located in schools. As far as Joe's question is concerned, my guess is that it probably has to do with patronage, but also concerns about student safety with lots of random adults in a school and just general logistical hassels.

UPDATE: Ed had more to say this afternoon about TABOR (Ezra Klein also discusses TABOR over at TAPPED) and other state initiatives, including a failed "65% solution" initiative in Colorado, which reminds me that my former colleague Alexander Wohl has an American Prospect piece on the stupidity of the whole "65 % solution" idea.

Get Out the Vote

Most of the people I know in D.C. are so preoccupied with who'll control the House and Senate following tomorrow's election, you wouldn't even know that we're also voting on several important D.C. government races tomorrow. That's partly an artifact of political class transience, and also of Democratic dominance in D.C. politics that means most of the major D.C. government races are already decided. (Adrian Fenty will be the next mayor.) But tomorrow D.C. voters have a chance to decide on three very important non-partisan offices that are still very much up in the air. Voters city-wide are voting on school board president, and voters in wards 5, 6, 7 & 8 are voting for school board members to represent their school board districts (wards 5 & 6 are on district, and wards 7 & 8 are another). These races are important because the D.C. school board has substantial power to impact education for children in D.C. And this year the race is particularly important because DCPS is at a critical juncture: with more than a quarter of the city's kids in charters, troublingly poor academic performance, an ambitious but slow-moving reform plan from Superintendent Janey, and incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty proclaiming his intention to take over the schools, the new school board is going to face some serious challenges and major decisions. So, if you live in D.C., take a second away from the national races to learn about the school board race and cast an informed vote tomorrow. I can't tell you who to vote for (like you'd listen to me anyway), but I will suggest you heed the advice of the Washington Post on this issue.

Review!

This week's Washington Post Magazine features their semi-annual Education Review. The cover story relates the experience of African American students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, who were denied an education for several years in the 1960s when the county closed all its public schools as an act of massive resistance to Brown vs. Board of Education. Important reminder of how little space and time there really is between today and a shameful history of de jure segregation that denied opportunities to generations of African Americans. On a positive note, Jay Mathews tells how Montgomery County, Maryland, is using all day kindergarten to help close achievement gaps for disadvantaged youngsters early.

William Styron, 1925 - 2006

The main character in Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity is constantly mulling over and revising a series of personal Top Ten lists, most related to music: "Greatest Songs to Appear on Side One, Track One," etc. One of the reasons I enjoyed the book was the discovery that I'm not the only person who has these internal conversations. My personal music lists are pretty basic, of the "Top Ten Desert Island Albums" type. The more involved lists run toward baseball and, especially, writing: Best writers, non-fiction (Michael Lewis), essays and criticism (Adam Gopnik), graphic novels (Alan Moore, obviously), observation of pop culture (Chuck Klosterman), and so on.

But the most extensively considered list has always been in the prime category of Novelist. Different authors have come on and off as I've gotten older and my tastes have changed, but there have always been two constants: all of the writers were alive, and William Styron was always somewhere on the list. I decided that until I read a better book than "Sophie's Choice," he wasn't moving. I haven't, and neither has he.

So the news of his death last week, while not surprising, was still unavoidably sad. Few 20th century writers wrote with his elegance and power, and fewer still--particularly American writers in Styron's mid-century cohort--chose to apply their gifts to the wrenching moral questions that defined the age. Styron didn't produce a lot--for years, articles would suggest that he was working on a final novel based on his experiences as a Marine in World War II, but one always had the sense that it would never come. Now it never will, but what he did give us was more--much more--than enough.

I Couldn't Resist

I just love this, prompted by Erin's last post of course. Almost as much as I love the word "islandize", used most recently by NCAA President Myles Brand in remarks about his presidential task force report on D1 athletics while describing the fiscal "stress" that higher ed is facing. College sports needs to be more aligned with the academic pursuits of higher education, says the report. Even if it seems impossible, Charlie Brown, it's a goal worth all the energy it will take.

Never, ever, ever give up

I love stories like this one in today’s Washington Post about the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas. While the name may conjure images of contraband cigarettes and a behind-bars drug trade, it’s, well, kind of about that. It’s about the fact that skills involved in setting up a complex, underground system for trading contraband items in jail may just be skills that are useful in setting up a successful, independent business.

The organization selects soon to be released inmates for an intensive business course, where they must complete assignments, are mentored by business executives, and eventually propose their own business plans. The program boasts a high success rate, including 93 percent employment, which is critical in preventing recidivism. The most heartening aspect of the program is the fact that it shows that these inmates, generally considered “undesirables” in society, are able to rise to the challenge and do the hard work necessary to succeed.

These programs serve as evidence that people (including students) respond to expectations - if we, as a society, expect former inmates to act like criminals, then that's likely what we'll get, but if we challenge ourselves to expect more, we might just get a group of people with the kinds of entreprenuerial skills our society relies on.

His spirit continues to drool...

Responding to this, Cato's Adam Schaeffer claims that

But the thing is, school choice through tax credits provides an education system more accountable to parents and the public than charters, voucher, or anything else.

Unfortunately, his own arguments undermine his case. In the next paragraph, he says:

Personal-use tax credits allow parents to spend their own money on schools that they choose . . . and school accountability to parents is the most effective kind of accountability. Donation tax credits let people choose the kinds of Scholarship Granting Organizations they think do the best job educating lower-income children. In both cases, the people with the most interest in holding schools accountable for results are the ones with the power to actually hold them accountable – parents and the people funding the schools.

But wouldn't tax credits actually weaken the incentives for donors to be serious about holding accountable the scholarship granting organizations they funded? Right now, people who donate to scholarship funds are doing so as acts of charity--they forfeit some other use of the money. But with a tax credit, they don't have to forfeit anything--if they get a dollar for dollar deduction in tax liability for their donation, the donation suddenly becomes free, thereby reducing its cost to the donor and his or her incentive to hold scholarship foundations accountable.

More significantly, Adam's point here acknowledges that the people who fund schools have a clear interest in holding those schools accountable. Guess what--when we're talking about education that's supported from public coffers, then the people funding the schools are all of us taxpayers, and we all have an interest in holding schools accountable for serving the public good. Adam might counter that we're not talking about education that's funded from the public coffers here, because education tax credits offer a subsidy on the tax side of the budget rather than the spending side--taxpayers get to choose how to use their own money. But it's still a publicly-supported subsidy for a specific behavior, and the difference between tax expenditures like education tax credits and government outlays on the spending side is more an accounting and timing difference than a practical one. In fact, the illusion that taxpayers/the public/the government isn't really paying for these scholarships or private school tuitions is one of the reasons I think that tax credits for private education are less desirable than flat-out vouchers, which make expenditures much more transparent.

Even if you don't buy the public interest in how kids educated on our dime are learning, there's still a case to be made here for a government accountability role in providing information needed to run a well-functioning education market place where parents and donors can make good decisions. Kind of like how you can buy whatever food you want, but the government mandates that all the packaged foods in the grocery store have comparable nutrition labels. As Kevin Kosar wrote recently on Edspresso, it's difficult for even a savvy parent to make sense of the information available on the performance of different schools. Good public accountability systems that provide comparable information for parents across available schools are essential to help parents make good decisions. Should accountability systems be designed to be more responsive to parent demands for information? Probably. But considering the angst with which middle-class suburban parents await test scores for their neighborhoods, I'd argue that there's a significant amount of parent demand even for the suboptimal test-based accountability information we have now.

I'm arguing this as a supporter of increased choice in publicly-supported education. I think families should have more freedom to choose the schools to which they send their kids and that a greater diversity of choices should be available to them. I don't care if you want to send your kid to a Montessori school, a single-sex school, a military school, a religious school, or a billingual Esperanto immersion school. But I do care, as a taxpayer, that schools using my tax money meet basic health and safety standards, don't discriminate, and teach kids sufficient math and verbal/literacy skills to contribute to the economy and have a decent shot in life. That's why we need both parent choice and public accountability. And it's why education tax credits just don't cut it.

Speaking of Mayoral Control

WaPo reports on what D.C. residents think of incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty's ambition to take over DC's troubled school system. The general verdict: people want change, so they're down for pretty much anything, but some are skeptical Mayoral control will fix the problem.

DC PTA president Darlene Allen sure doesn't: "It's not the structure that causes the problem, it's the people who are being elected," she told the Post. But if DC school board politics play out in such a way that either the people voters have to choose from are not very good or voters consistently pick people who don't run the board well, doesn't that at some point suggest a broader structural problem with how we select our school boards and maybe the need for alternatives?

More Spitzer

NYT today looks at education issues in the NY state gubernatorial race between Democrat Eliot Spitzer and Republican John Faso. Both support raising the cap on charter schools in the state and extending Mayor Michael Bloomberg's control over the NYC schools. But they disagree about how much more money the state should give to NYC schools in response to the CFE lawsuit. Spitzer wants to give NYC and other poor districts $8.5 billion more a year. Faso doesn't.

Credit where Credit's Due?

Ryan at Edspresso and Adam Schaeffer at Cato-at-Liberty are both drooling over NY gubernatorial candidate Elliot Spitzer's support for school choice. Joe Williams also notes that Albany, NY, charter founder Thomas Carroll is psyched about Spitzer's school reform cred. I'm quite happy to see a prominent Democrat like Spitzer embracing charter schools, but I can't share Ryan and Adam's enthusiasm about his support for education tax credits.

It particularly troubles me to see these tax credits being hyped by Schaeffer as a "third way" alternative to vouchers. If you're a moderate on these issues, you should actually find tax credits more troubling than straight-out vouchers, mainly because tax credits for private education have even less public accountability for how public funds are used than do vouchers. The second issue is a more wonky one, but in general, doing education spending indirectly through tax credits is less transparent and more complicated than spending funds for vouchers outright would be. There's also distribution: Unless tax credits are refundable and capped, you wind up subsidizing affluent people who are already sending their kids to private schools rather than expanding educational options for disadvantaged families. Basically, the only reason to go this route is to get around Blaine Amendments or because it's somewhat less politically controversial (for all the wrong reasons) than regular vouchers.

There could be a silver lining in all of this, however: The last attempt to create an education tax credit in New York got transformed, for political reasons, into a broad child tax credit. In contrast to education-specific tax credits, generalized child tax credits (particularly if they are refundable for low-income families) are a good idea, because they provide a general supplement to parents' incomes that they can use to help defray the costs of childrearing in whatever way best serves their families' unique needs (including in the early years when children are particularly costly and parents' incomes are often low). In these days of stagnating incomes, parents, particularly lower on the income scale, need all the help they can get.

Tarnishing a Silver Bullet?

It's become sort of a truism in education that parent involvement is critical to student achievement--But what does that mean when a parent works two jobs to make ends meet, doesn't speak English well-enough to communicate with school officials, or has little or no formal education herself? That's the question Joseph Berger asks in an NYT article about the obstacles to parent involvement for Latino immigrant families in Newburgh, N.Y. It's not that these parents don't care about their kids' education. Many of them came here in part to give their children a better life and have high aspirations for them, but lack skills and resources to give them the educational supports schools that serve middle-class students often take for granted.

Cultural perspectives about the roles of educators and parents are also an issue, notes researcher Pedro Noguera. "In many Latin American countries there’s a tendency to defer to authorities in school, an assumption that educators know what they’re doing.” Affluent white parents often monitor children's progress closely and don't hesitate to advocate with school authorities on their children's behalf. But “many immigrants parents don’t understand that this is a role they need to play,” instead defering to educators as experts. This is also true for working-class and poor parents more generally, as sociologist Annette Lareau demonstrates in her book Unequal Childhoods. The conflict between schools' expectation that parents should act like affluent and middle-class parents do, and lower-class parents' own views on what appropriate parental involvement means, can create tension between parents and schools, further pushing parents away and leading students to view school as an alien culture hostile to their own. No one denies that parents are incredibly important, but it's unrealistic to expect low-income parents to start acting like more affluent parents. Parent involvement isn't a silver bullet.

The Wire Week Seven: A Man's Got to Have a Code

The signal moment in this week's episode of The Wire came during the prison exchange between Omar and Bunk. Omar's been framed by Marlo for killing an innocent citizen. Bunk knows that Omar only robs and murders drug dealers, but begins by saying "Hey, even if you didn't kill this woman you've killed lots of other people, so that's justice one way or the other." To which Omar responds, "If Omar didn't kill that woman, then someone else did," and moreover, "A man's got have a code."

Like so much on The Wire, this has meaning on multiple levels, one related directly to the characters at hand, and one resonant with the larger themes that the creators are developing this season.

In the first sense, Omar is talking about the nature of manhood. To Omar, a man can't be a man unless he lives by a code. The nature of the code itself isn't the issue, the important thing is giving the code fidelity, whatever it may be. In other words, nothing is more important than integrity. Omar and Bunk, who came from the same neighborhood and went the same high school, took opposite paths in life, but they share this core belief. Omar knows this about Bunk, and thus it's no surprise later in the episode to see Bunk trying to get Omar transfered to a safer jail and suggesting to the other homicide detectives working the case that Omar might not be guilty. Bunk's code, like Omar's, is rooted in a sense of justice: bad people deserve to be punished. But Bunk also believes that justice demands truth, and that truth can't be suberted to punish the wicked.

That's why the virtuous characters in The Wire like Bunk and McNulty respect Omar while despising many of their colleagues--like Omar, they believe that integrity matters most. Contrast Omar with the corrupt police officer who steals from criminals, children, even poor Bubbles. He's a minor, one-dimensional character; his only purposes is to serve as the anti-Omar, a man defined by his lack of integrity. Rationally speaking, one could argue that he's still doing more to make the world a better place than Omar, a murderer and a thief. But let's be honest--if he and Omar met in a dark alley, which of the two would you, the viewer, really want to walk away? I think you'd pick Omar, and not just because he's more interesting to watch on TV.

Omar's credo can also be interpreted a very different way: codes are unavoidable. A man's got to have a code in the sense that he can't not have one. It's the nature of the human condition to look for rules to live by. The corner boys rushing toward some kind of manhood in The Wire are all struggling to define themselves. The misadventures of rookie teacher Prezbo and the vignettes of poorly managed public schools represent only a small facet of this season's focus on education. The much larger issue is how children growing up on the streets of west Baltimore internalize social codes that have been warped and degraded by the social anarchy caused by the drug trade. That's really what Colvin and the professor are after--understanding the codes that cause students like Namond to be who they are, and changing them before they become written in blood and stone.

Suffer the Children II

This NYT article about child trafficking and forced labor in Africa is incredibly sad. UNESCO reports that youngsters in Sub-Saharan Africa are the least likely of anywhere in the world to attend primary education. The share of Sub-Saharan youngsters attending elementary schooling has increased 27% since 1999, but one third of youngsters still do not attend school, often because they must work or cannot afford school fees.

While this child's story is heartbreaking on a human level, there's a broader problem here than individual suffering. When very young children must work instead of learning basic skills like reading, writing and math; when their health and nutrition are sacrificed because their families lack adequate provisions for them or value them less than adults, you essentially have a society that is cannibalizing its future--physically, cognitively and psychologically. The labor these small children provide is not particularly efficient, and it comes at severe costs in terms of their long-term potential as workers and contributors to their society. These children's parents are in an untenable situation with few choices, but the choices they are making lock generations in a vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty. One of the long-term benefits of agricultural advances and industrialization was that, despite some serious abuses of child labor to begin with, eventually the resulting productivity gains allowed adult family members to support the family without child labor, freeing children to attend school, allowing the development of a more educated population, which increased productivity, raised living standards, and led to a virtuous cycle of more education, productivity and better living standards.* Improving basic health, education and nutrition for children in the developing world is critical.

(*As Jonathan Chait points out in the latest New Republic, this cycle has seemed in some ways to be a bit less virtuous of late in the U.S., since the wages of productivity gains in recent years flow almost entirely to the very richest Americans, while everyone else's living standards stagnate. But that doesn't detract from the broader point that getting the virtuous cycle started by equipping kids with basic skills is an important first step to building decent lives for people.)

Don't Breathe Easy

NYT reports on a new study looking at Bronx schoolchildren's exposure to pollution and its impact on their asthma. The picture is not pretty. In the Bronx, there are 9.3 asthma-related hospital admissions annually per 1,000 children. And in Harlem, which has one of the country's highest asthma rates, a 2003 study found one in four children has asthma. Nationally, asthma is the leading cause of missed days of school, accounting for nearly 15 million missed school days annually. Asthma rates are increasing. And, disadvantaged kids, because of lack of access to health care, poor housing, and living in polluted urban areas, are among those who experience the most severe consequences from asthma, exacerbating achievement gaps.

Negative consequences from asthma are particularly frustrating because a lot of asthma-related problems could be prevented if more children had proper preventative health care to manage their asthma. Teaching kids to manage their asthma is relatively cheap. Uninsured kids winding up in the emergency room when they have an asthma attack is expensive. The costs of missed school days and difficulty learning because you can't breathe are harder to estimate, but kids and society pay for them as well.

Professional College Football

Selena Roberts' column($) about big-time college football in the NYTimes yesterday echoes a piece George Will wrote last week, each relying heavily on a recent letter from Rep. Bill Thomas, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to the president of the NCAA. Thomas wants to know why, exactly, it's okay for tax-exempt colleges and universities to be running massive, for-profit professional sports leagues. It's a good question.

I have nothing against pro sports. Like lots of people, I'm a big fan, particularly of the professional football team owned and operated by my grad school alma mater, Ohio State. The Buckeyes are kicking eleven kinds of butt this year and I'm enjoying every minute of it. When we spank Michigan next month on our way to the national title game, it will be a great day for all right-thinking Americans.

At the same time, in the 11 years since I left Columbus I've been treated to a regular diet of scandals and unsavory reports of how the university has consistently bent and broken its policies and values in support of the franchise. Academic misconduct, grading scandals, riots led by drunken fans, ex-players arrested upon being found driving erratically in a truck loaded with a bullet-proof vest, a loaded AK-47 type assault rifle, three loaded handguns, a hatchet, and an open, half-drunk bottle of vodka--the list goes on.

Every one of these incidents embarrasses the university and stains its good name. And if could trade them in for fewer wins on the field--if a clean program meant more Saturdays on the receiving end of the 44-0 drubbing OSU gave Minnesota last weekend--I'd do it in a minute.
There's a place for pro football teams that put winning above all else: the NFL.

The real question is why universities don't see things the same way, why they routinely sell their higher ideals and institutional values for the fame, money, and thrills that go with big-time sports. In one sense the question answers itself -- fame, money, and thrills have always tempted people, and some people are always too weak to resist. But the answer also lies with the complex, insular nature of the institutions themselves.

Colleges and universities do much more than teach. They provide community and a powerful sense of shared identity in a world where those things can hard to come by. Sports augment and focus that process. There's something undeniably great about sitting in a stadium with a 100,000 other people that all want what you want, that for at least a few hours see the world just like you. The problem is when those shared desires are so in conflict with the basic mission of education that we all end up coming together to support something that shames us in the end. As long as colleges continue own pro sports franchises, the danger of that will be hard to avoid.

Advising Mr. Fenty

Writing in the Washington Post Outlook section, T. Robinson Ahlstrom, headmaster of Washington Latin School, a recently-opened public charter school in the District, asserts that "DCPS is dead. It's time to bury it," by replacing the elected Board of Education with a NYC-style Department of Education Accountable only to Mayor-to-be Fenty.

I don't disagree with Ahlstrom that DCPS' failure to educate many children is a tremendous tragedy for these children individually and the city as a whole. I'm not sure I buy his argument, though, that political will alone is the problem here. Suppose someone, say, a newly elected Mayor, had the political will and political capitol to enact whatever agenda he sought to renew the public schools in DC. (This would be an incredible feat because so many entities--Congress, the city Council, the CFO, Board of Education, etc.--are involved in making decisions about DC's governance, but it might actually be possible given the current dismay with DCPS' performance and the fact that Superintendent Janey seems to be losing some of his luster.) Even then, there's still the issue of what to do.

And, when you're dealing with a system that has DC's problems, that's not an easy question. There's nothing wrong with Ahlstrom's ideas (heck, I proposed moving DC's public school facilities into the control of an independent agency all the way back here), although I do think he overstates the case a bit when it comes to DCPS' financial inefficiency and teachers unions (and I'd love to see Leo Casey take him on about the latter set of arguments). But I doubt they're enough.

There are basically two schools of thought on how to fix DCPS and other troubled urban school systems. One is a sort of radical decentralization approach, which argues that the thing to do is to dramatically cut bureacracy, radically constrain the authority of school boards or central administration, give school site managers control over their budgets and schools, encourage and foster the growth of charter schools and other autonomous options, and push existing schools to become more charter-like. Paul Hill's portfolio model is something along these lines. This is particularly appealing in a place like DC, where 25% of the students are already in charter schools. The other idea is much more centralized. It focuses on centralizing and coordinating curriculum, professional development, and other key activities so that they are aligned across the system.

These two alternatives seem opposite, but they are not entirely at odds. The NYC efforts, for example, with which Mr. Fenty seems quite enamored, contain elements of both. As will, likely, any effective approach for DC. Certainly, expanding the number of high-performing charter schools, creating a more hospitable atmosphere for them, and giving more autonomy and budgetary control to better-performing DCPS schools would be a positive step. But the performance of many DCPS schools (as well as rapid principal turnover in DCPS) doesn't inspire confidence that their leadership should be given more autonomy. At least in the short to medium run, addressing the problems in these schools will require some sort of central bureaucracy that can align standards and curriculum in these schools, diagnose and address problems, and provide high-quality leaders and teachers. At a minimum, some sort of central leadership needs to make sure that the district's most basic systems--things like payroll, procurement, student data collection--function properly for these schools. There's also a critical central role for addressing DC's special ed crisis. Making the trains run on time won't improve student achievement, but if teachers and principals are spending all kinds of time trying to work their way around basic operational issues, that's a huge barrier to improving student learning.

The Williams administration was successful in addressing a lot of these issues elsewhere in the DC government, so capacity on these issues exists in the city, and perhaps moving control of DCPS to the Mayor's office can lead to progress here. But there are two concerns. The first is churn. The District's educational system has suffered from incredible instability in the past decade. It's been governed by an elected school board, the federally-appointed control board, and a hybrid appointed-elected school board. It's had seven superintendents during that time period. With this kind of governance and leadership turmoil, is it any wonder not many improvement efforts gained traction or produced results for DC's kids? One reason that DC's charter schools, on average, are doing better than DCPS schools is that the best charter schools have actually had a lot more stability in DCPS. In his book Spinning Wheels, AEI's Rick Hess writes about the dangers of reform churn, a never-ending cycle of reform efforts in urban school districts that are abandoned before they are even fully implemented, let alone have a chance to succeed. Shifting control of the schools to the Mayor would create tremendous turmoil and churn. That's not to say it may not be a good idea, but the potential benefits need to be weighed against the costs of churn, and the people Fenty selects to manage the process need to strive to reduce the negative impacts of churn.

The second danger is that governance changes can create the appearance of change without really improving anything. Giving the Mayor control of the schools is not in itself a good reform strategy. It's what he does with the control that matters. And there are a lot of good things a Mayor can do, like better connecting education and other social services in the District to address the many health, family, and other problems kids carry with them to school.

A lot of what needs to happen to improve schooling in DC is not flashy, bullet-pointable, initiatives. A lot of it is pretty basic, day-to-day stuff: making the trains run on time, hiring and developing good people, holding people accountable, getting a good curriculum, sticking with it and refining it to make it work.

Look For Those Lights Tonight

A week or so ago InsideHigherEd.com posed the question: Football is everything?

The Nike ad of the same name (sin question mark) doesn't just assure us that yes, football is everything but also reminds us of some of our finest stereotypes about student athletes and high schools. Classrooms filled with young strong men garbed in game-day uniforms (it's not clear that there are students in the class who are not football players) who sit disrespectfully with their feet up in class and who know to expect special treatment since it is, after all, game day. These are mostly young black men who are waltzing down the hall, giving high fives and flirting with a come-hither Hollywood hot blond girl. All distractions cast aside for the big game, of course, before which this team of young men gather to pause for prayer. They are then victorious in a stadium that looks more like FedEx field than a high school field and is packed with cheering fans with signs and face make-up.

All of this under those Friday Night Lights. Yes, NBC has managed to make a longer version of this ad with its "The OC meets Odessa,Texas" teen drama where the coach doesn't teach any classes at the school ("football coaching is more than a full time job" quips the wife)and the girls bake cookies for their assigned star players. The show, by the way, does not air on Friday night (maybe because it would take us away from making the big game?).

Also, read Sara's earlier post on single sex. Because it's important and worth reading, not because it relates to football. Although if we DO go single sex, this may change the cookie-baking rules.

International Perspective

A new UNESCO report looks at educational issues internationally and finds progress but lots of room for growth. About 86 percent of primary-school aged children are enrolled in school, and Sub-saharan Africa, which has the lowest rate of youngsters attending primary school, increased primary school enrollments 27 percent between 1999 and 2004. Progress is also being made in gender equity, with 94 girls now enrolled in school internationally per 100 boys, up from 92 in 1999. But too many children still lack access to school or fail to complete their schooling, and one-in-five adults internationally lacks basic literacy skills--two thirds of those lacking these skills are female. The report also pays particular attention to early childhood care and education, and offers examples from many countries.

Single Sex/Multiple Facets

I think Andy and Brad Plumer are both right in this scuffle over new Department of Ed regs that give schools and districts more leeway to experiment with single-sex education. I'm predisposed to agree with Andy on this, because I believe in giving children and their families more educational choices, and I think the bar for excluding an entire category of choices (such as single-sex schools) ought to be quite high, and that critics of single-sex education haven't met it yet. Andy's also right that there are some single-sex schools (particularly for women) that, far from reaffirming gender stereotypes have an explicit goal of empowering young women, helping them transcend those sterotypes and succeed economically and academically.

But Brad is also right that some single-sex education advocates also call for gender-based educational approaches that rest on deeply flawed arguments. Americans in general, and particularly educators, have been awestruck by recent research advances that allow us to see the structure and functioning of human brains more clearly than ever before. A cottage industry of education writers and professional development consultants has grown up around helping educators apply brain research to their educational practice. Since we're all obsessed with sex, any research findings about gender differences in the brain are guaranteed to garner national headlines and spark debate. And some of these practitioners, such as Leonard Sax and Michael Gurian, specifically focus on issues of gender differences in the brain in relation to education. The examples Brad offers from Louisiana are based on the kind of notions these guys are peddling about gender differences and their impact on learning.

The problem is, a lot of what they are peddling is crap. They are not neuroscientists and often get the research wrong. It's not that there aren't differences between men's and women's brains. But, as this great American Educator article notes, a lot of "brain research" is really still in its infancy and a long way from being able to provide useful applications for educators. This is true of much of the research on gender differences in the brain. Knowing that a certain structure is larger or smaller in the male or female brain doesn't actually tell you that you should teach boys one way and girls another way. Practitioners like Gurian and Sax draw causal connections between identified differences in male and female brains and stereotypical male and female behaviors, even though many of the links in their causal chain are purely conjecture. And they gloss over the fact that variations among males and females are often much greater than average differences between the sexes. Gender-based educational interventions have never been subject to rigorous, scientifically valid evaluations to determine their effectiveness. The problem isn't that "brain-based" approaches to educate males and females differently are sexist (although they may well strike people that way). It's that they're based on misunderstandings, misapplication and gross overreading of research.

Single-sex and gender-based education are actually two very different things that could potentially be connected but need not be. They should be discussed and debated accordingly, not conflated.

Paradise Lost

EduCap announced that its controversial all-expense paid conference in the Caribbean for financial aid officers is cancelled. My guess, though, is that this is not the last we’ll hear about this issue. While lending companies vigorously deny using inducements to gain that coveted status of ‘preferred lender’, economics tells us that thinly veiled efforts like EduCap’s to get on the preferred lender list are likely to increase.

Inside Higher Ed provides a great overview of this issue – the rising tuition, declining grant aid, and increases in loans, especially private loans (the types of loans EduCap gives), which don’t have the protections for borrowers that federal loans do.

What this information tells us is that the stakes are getting higher. There’s more money to be made now than ever before in student lending. Instead of relying on companies to decide what is or is not appropriate, or on financial aid officers to demurely resist any offers of free vacations, we need to establish a system that truly works for and protects students. That system will necessarily include a better definition of the role of financial aid officers and more clearly defined regulations on what lending companies can offer and do to promote their products.

Halloween Tartlets

Via Alexander Russo, this Boulder Weekly columnist bemoans the marketing of "sexy" Halloween costumes to pre-pubescent girls. I admit, I was Cleopatra for Halloween when I was eight or nine, but since this was October in Michigan (which is often accompanied by snow), I wasn't exactly showing any skin. At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old person, I do sometimes get the sense that little girls' clothes are more sexualized today than they were in my fabled youth. It's not just Halloween costumes--Have you seen the "regular" duds in the 4-6x section of your local Target recently? On the other hand, if this guy thinks the picture accompanying his article online portrays an excessively sexual costume, he really does need to get a life.

More Michigan

Over at NCLBlog, AFT Michigan president David Hecker weighs in ony my report on Michigan's charter schools. I'm excited to see this, because there's a real need for more civil and serious dialogue between the charter school community and teachers unions and other more established education groups that often oppose charters. As this report from PPI and the National Charter Schools Research Project points out, there's a lot of misconceptions on both sides, and a lot of talking past each other. Only a commitment to honest dialogue can help address that.

Hecker thinks my report is mostly on the mark, but disagrees with my assertion that Michigan's charter schools overall are outperforming the state's urban districts in which they are located.

He makes a worthwhile point, so let's clarify this a little: On average, Michigan's charter school students perform better on the state's MEAP assessments than do students who attend traditional district schools in the 18 Michigan school districts (mostly, but not all, urban) that have 3 or more charters within their boundaries. But, this average masks enormous variation within both sectors: there are some excellent schools, both charter and traditional district schools, in Michigan's urban districts. But there are also a lot of mediocre and truly abysmal ones, in both sectors, which no child should have to attend. It's been said ad nauseum, but I'll repeat it again: charters are not a type of school, but a governance innovation. Asking whether that governance innovation generates schools that are, on average, better-performing than what was there before is a legitimate question (but not the only question) to ask in evaluating the impacts of this governance innovation as policy. But that question mainly matters to wonky folks like me. What really matters is reducing the number of crappy schools in both sectors--either by improving or closing them--and increasing the number of good ones. The fact that nearly 10 percent of the charters opened in Michigan to date have been closed suggests that, in the charter sector, closing crappy schools sometimes happens. Are there more schools--both charter and traditional district schools--that should be closed? Probably. Should we be doing more to replicate high-performing schools in both sectors? Hell, yes. Hecker and other union leaders could support this process by praising authorizers when they close down low-performing charters, rather than seizing on closures as evidence the charter model is flawed. Closures are a feature, not a bug.

Speaking of authorizers, Hecker is critical of the fact that Michigan's university authorizers receive 3 percent of the per-pupil funding for schools they oversee. But if there's one important lesson we've learned in the charter movement so far, it's that quality authorizing is difficult, requires staff time and resources, and someone's got to pay for it. Funding authorizer operations adequately is a critical state policy step to supporting charter school quality and accountability. Have some authorizers in Michigan and nationally taken advantage of authorizer funding streams to support unrelated operations while doing a crappy job (or basically no job) overseeing schools they charter? Yeah (and a lot of those authorizers have been school districts). But the solution to this is to strengthen the mechanisms through which authorizers are held accountable for the performance of the schools they charter, not to stop financially supporting authorizer operations. Overall, nationally, research shows that universities have done a better job of authorizing than many other authorizers. There's a reason the UFT went to SUNY to get charters for their schools in New York, and not to the NYC schools.

Finally, Hecker's final comment hits on an issue that I've been thinking about a lot lately:

The main point that the report does not make is that the original intent of charters was for them to serve as an incubator of new ideas and approaches, with the successful strategies being incorporated into traditional public schools. The point was not to develop an entirely separate system of public education--one with very limited accountability and that siphons money away from traditional districts. Another important point is that I do not know of anything going on in a Michigan charter that has not been--or can not be done--by a traditional public school.

Yes, fostering innovation is one initial intent of charter schools that appears in many state laws, but it wasn't the only goal. In Michigan, the rationale for chartering had a lot to do with wanting to expand parent choice. I also tend to beleive that having a diversity of educational models available to parents in different schools is a positive social good--whether or not those schools are "innovative"--because there's tremendous diversity among children, and not every kid is going to thrive under the same educational model. As I note in the report, there is a lot of innovation going on in Michigan's charter school sector--but much of it is management and organizational innovation (such as the role of EMOs in the state), which is much more difficult to translate to the public sector than curricular and pedagogical innovations.

And there are clearly some very innovative charters in Michigan. I encourage Hecker to visit Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, or Walden Green Montessori in Spring Lake, or the Chatfield School, in Lapeer. There's no hypothetical reason district schools couldn't do some of the things these excellent schools do. But the reality is that doing what these schools do in the district system can be risky.

The more I learn about chartering, the more I come to appreciate the legal protection a charter contract offers to visionary educators. It's worth remembering that Michigan's charter school movement has its roots in the "empowerment schools" initiative in Detroit in the late 1980s. A reform-minded school board initiated charter-like contracts with schools that gave them greater autonomy and control over their funding in return for accountability. But when an election swept out members of that school board, the agreement fell apart and the empowered schools lost the freedoms they had gained and went back to being normal schools. Autonomy and innovation that depend on the good will of elected school boards and the educational administrators they appoint are inherently precarious. In a place like the District of Columbia, where school boards come and go and there have been seven superintendents in the past 10 years, the legal protections of a charter school contract actually mean some of these schools have more stability than schools within the district system. Charters can offer opportunities for a lot of things teachers want--stability, autonomy, opportunities for innovation. That's part of why the UFT opened its own charter school, and it's why I remain hopeful in the potential for productive dialogue between charter and teachers union leaders.

UPDATE: Leo Casey joins the conversation. I couldn't agree with him more that charter school advocates need to be more outspoken than anyone about supporting good authorizers and getting bad ones out of the business. That's been a major ongoing theme of the series of state and urban charter school reports I helped edit first at PPI and now at Education Sector, and I'm proud to say that some of our work has contributed marginally to helping improve authorizing in some of these states.

How Does Your State Stack Up on Pre-K?

Find out in this new report from Pre-K Now. National picture: 31 states increased their preschool funding by $450 million for FY2007. And don't forget quality.

Wherein Prudery Trumps Cultural Literacy

It's old news, but, if I were an advocate for teacher unionism, I'd be highlighting this incident till the cows come home as an example of why teachers need protection against capricious firings. Is it any wonder our children don't know anything about Ancient Greece, Rome and the roots of Western culture? I mean, what better than the profusion of nekkid statues to get kids interested in these subjects?

More Flex For Single Sex

Spellings announces amended regulations for single-sex education. More flexibility for single sex classes and schools.

My earlier rant on single-sex.

And a recent report out of the UK-based Centre for Education and Employment Research on single-sex. Looks at the issue cross-nationally and worth reading.

Charter Schooling in the Wolverine State

This is the picture that I wanted to have on the cover of Education Sector's new report on charter schooling in Michigan (see, I don't hate boys). Sadly, I was vetoed by people who claim to have taste and didn't want to pay big licensing fees for the image.

So, without Hugh Jackman's mug on the cover, why should you read this report on charter schooling in Michigan? Let me tell you:

For starters, Michigan is a leading charter state. It was one of the earliest states to pass a law and has more students in charter schools than any state except for California and Florida.

Second, Michigan's charter school movement has some unique features that make it particularly interesting. Nearly three-quarters of Michigan's charter schools are run by private, for-profit Educational Management Organizations (EMOs), more than any other state in the country. There are both good and bad sides to this. In addition, most of Michigan's charter schools have been authorized not by the local school districts and state agencies that oversee charters in most states, but by the state's public universities, many of which have been eager to authorize charter schools. Although the public universities had quality problems in their charter oversight early on, they have improved and these independent authorizers are, on average, higher-quality authorizers than many of the authorizers that operate elsewhere in the country.

Third, the political history of charter schooling in Michigan is very interesting, and involves a compelling cast of characters, including former Governor John Engler, a Republican; current Governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat; Detroit's Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick; asphalt magnate-turned-philanthropist Bob Thompson; former Piston Hall of Famer Dave Bing; former Dem gubernatorial candidate-turned charter school founder Doug Ross, and 3,200 protesting Detroit teachers. Who needs the Wire when you've got this bunch?

Finally, and I think this is the most important point, Michigan's experience is a clear example of why the charter school movement must focus on quality. In the mid-1990s Michigan's charter schools grew rapidly and somewhat wildly. While some excellent schools emerged, there were also lots of quality problems, demonstrating that the "if you build it they will come" approach to chartering isn't enough itself to produce a strong supply of quality schools. Since then, the state's charter community and university authorizers have improved quality, but Michigan's charter schools still underperform statewide averages (they are doing better than the urban districts in which most are located, however) and the fallout from early quality problems undermines political support for them.

There's lots more, so read the report!

Via Mike Antonucci, another reason the Michigan report is relevant today.

Big Bird Trumps Baseball

Yes, it is Game 3 of the World Series, but they’re tied 1-1, so no one’s winning tonight anyway. Instead, tune in to Independent Lens on PBS for “The World According to Sesame Street” and spend the evening reconnecting with Bert and Ernie. Check out this post for more information about the movie.

Suffer the Children

UNICEF is trying to improve early childhood development in Iraq. This is obviously very, very difficult.

“Whether it is education, nutrition levels or access to basic services, the continued conflict taking place in Iraq is affecting all aspects of the lives of children,” says UNICEF Iraq Senior Programme Officer Geeta Verma.

I don't mean to dismiss UNICEF's work, but, under the circumstances, it's kind of hard to get excited about universal salt iodization (which helps prevent iodine deficiencies), fortified wheat flour, or professional development for 25 early childhood educators. Regardless of where events in Iraq are headed in the short to mid-term, long-term the nation will have to cope with the fallout from a generation of children traumatized by growing up in a war zone.

Back to Basics?

First it was penmanship. Now it's grammar. Or so sayeth the Post, anyway. I'm holding out for long division, myself.

UPDATE: KDerosa has more on why penmanship matters.

College Rankings Throw-Down

On Wednesday morning from 9:30 to 11:30, you'll be coming to Education Sector's panel discussion on college rankings and higher education accountability, to be held at the Capital Hilton, just two blocks north of the White House. Register here.

What's that you say? Staff meeting that morning? Big project due? No, no, you're not fooling anyone. You and I both know you're coming. It's an all-star cast of movers and shakers. The Secretary of Education's Chief of Staff. The Executive Editor of U.S. News & World Report. The President of Trinity College. Yours truly, and more! All debating which colleges really are the best in the nation and how exactly that determination should be made.

If you're really not going to be there (and between you and me, if you can't wangle your way out of work to get to an event as cool as this, it's time to updating your resume and trolling for job announcement on line. Life is short, friend. Think about it.) the audio will be live Webcast. But seriously, be there.

The Real Problem In Our Schools

Unsupervised chasing.

Yes, I'm Going To College (Unless I Go Pro)

A new NCES report about high school sophomores shows that most of them "plan and expect" to earn a 4-year college degree or higher. The racial breakdown shows this to be true for 77 percent of black students, 87 percent of Asian students, 81 percent of white students, and 73 percent of Latino students. Almost all (93 percent) of high income kids, 79 percent of middle income kids and 66 percent of the lowest income kids say they'll receive at least a bachelor's degree.

These percentages are all big jumps from 1980 and 1990- not so surprising really since we've done a pretty good job advertising that a college education is valuable and ultimately the gateway to the middle class. And since everyone basically believes they are middle-class, it's not surprising that most would probably think they would go to college.

Sadly, we know many of them won't go and many more won't graduate.

Which brings me to my neighbor, who at age fourteen will look you straight in the eye and tell you he plans to be a professional basketball player. This despite the fact that he does not play on his school's basketball team, nor has he (in the four years I've known him) ever participated in a team sport. When I point this out to him, he waves me off and I realize that while one part of him is genuinely planning to go pro there is another part of him that knows he won't. Will he go to college? Yes, he says. But he's taking pre-algebra again and doesn't know what the PSAT is when I ask him. I also ask him what college he plans to go to. He doesn't know and doesn't want to answer. He's not looking at me straight anymore and I think he realizes–now that we're really talking about it–that his options are pretty limited.

My neighbor's no exception. A sociologist at UNC-Charlotte, Roslyn Mickelson, wrote an article back in the 90s about a phenomenon she called the attitude-achievement paradox. Focused on mostly low-income Black students, she found through her research that student attitudes operate on two different levels. These kids know that college is highly valued in society and so express positive attitudes about it. But on another level, the one rooted in their daily lives where college graduation is the exception not the norm, they realize that the path to college is not so clear for them. Ask these kids if college is important and they will convincingly agree. Ask them if they plan to go and they will nod with certainty. Then ask them how they will get from here to there. They may pause, shrug or say they'll figure it out later but they probably won't start describing their course schedules, college application materials, and financial aid options.

All this to say that these kids really don't need us to emphasize how and why college is so important (stay in school! college grads earn more!). They need some concrete knowledge and skills and support to navigate the not-so-obvious and never easy process of getting from where they are to where they "plan and expect" (and deserve) to get.

Village People

“It takes a Village” was the refrain of this morning’s policy breakfast forum held by the D.C. State Education Office on it’s new report, “Double the Numbers for College Success: A Call to Action for the District of Columbia.” In response to the report’s conclusion that 9 out of 100 D.C. students complete college on a traditional timeline, a wide range of ‘villagers’ at the forum stated their commitment to improving college access and attainment for D.C. students.

While it may have confirmed what many on the panel and in the audience already sensed, this report provided the important service of establishing common ground – that 9% college graduation is much too low – for a wide variety of education advocates whose agendas sometimes conflict. Instead of promoting individual agendas, the theme today was collaboration, as a wide range of speakers – parents, university presidents, council members, the mayor and superintendent – emphasized the need for a commitment from everyone in the city.

I don’t want to rain on the village parade with all the encouraging talk of collaboration and commitment (no sarcasm there, it really was encouraging), but I’ve got to push the question – “Double the Numbers” is just a start, right? It will certainly be an achievement, but an 18% college graduation rate can’t be the finish line.

P.S. An interesting element of the report is the wide range in DC students’ graduation rates at various universities. Among the top three universities DC students attend, graduation rates were 9% at UDC, 12% at Howard, and 51% at Trinity University. As the report states, this emphasizes the need to help students understand that not all colleges are created equal when it comes to getting students to graduate, and key to increasing graduation rates is encouraging students to attend institutions that have the most success with low-income and minority students.

Department of Odd Juxtapositions

Both from NYT's ten most e-mailed:

"Preschoolers Grow Older as Parents Seek an Edge"

"Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes"


Hint: Moms and Dads, if you're kid's growing pubic hair, it's probably time to let him/her move on to kindergarten.

Getting on the Little People Bandwagon

The Century Foundation hearts preschool. And they think it should be universal, not targeted.

Stupid and Happy

So, does Brookings' Tom Loveless know how to work the press or what? It's all about the counterintuitive, kids. The latest Brown Center Report on American Education shows that kids in countries with higher average math test scores are less likely to say they enjoy math and are good at it than kids from countries with lower test scores, which is not quite the same as "Happy, Confident Students Do Worse than Math," but, hey, what's it matter. I mean, I was miserable in high school and I did very well in math, so it must be true, right?

It's not surprising the report got most attention for its most counterintutive finding, but I actually think it's a lot less interesting than the report's other sections, which looked at trends on the main and long-term NAEP (scores are up in math, stagnant in reading and science, and high school students are faring worst of all the age groups), and whether or not differences in state performance on NAEP and their own state tests means states are "gaming the system" by lowering their standards, an interesting question relevant to the renewed interest in national standards. Most interesting, IMHO: Loveless suggests that the poor NAEP performance of high schoolers may reflect their tendency to screw around on the test. Teenagers screwing around?!?! Who knew?

Learning on the Brain

Writing in the fall American Educator cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham explains why much of the hype about brain-based learning is just that, and he proceeds to eviscerate several popular "brain science"-based education myths, including the myth that schools are designed for left-brained students, the myth that schools are designed to suit girls' brains, and the myth that classical musical is critical to stimulating young children's brains. Well worth reading.

Gratuitous Edu Catblogging

Joe Williams reports that the NYC Department of Education is cracking down on rats and mice in the city's schools, following a NY Post report that 360 school cafeterias were rife with the vermin. Ewww! Hope none of them are participating in Erin's cook-off. Jelly, pictured here, offers her services to the students of New York.

Spending Limit Silliness

AFTie Ed has been posting extensively on the issue of state Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) initiatives. He thinks they're bad for education, and he's absolutely right.

TABOR provisions--often implemented via ballot iniative or constitutional amendment--limit annual state spending growth to a fixed percentage, typically tied to the inflation rate and sometimes a measure of population growth. State spending typically increases at higher rate, usually in line with the overall growth in the economy. If the economy grows by 5%, for example, 1% might be due to population growth, 2% to inflation, and 2% to increases in economic productivity. TABOR provisions essentially deny the public the right to invest the fruits of productivity growth in public services, including schools. Thus, public employees--like teachers--whose work contributes to economic growth don't share in those rewards.

In addition to being simplistic and mechanistic, TABOR provisions are also intensely undemocratic. They amount to the citizens of today denying the citizens of the future the chance to have different opinions about how much public spending is desirable (unless that amount happens to be less than spending today).

Ed's advocacy on this issue also emphasizes a point that sometimes gets lost in the various internecine education policy disputes around unions and collective bargaining: while unions may be wrong on some of the issues within education policy, they're on the right side of many of the most important issues outside of education policy, this being just one example. There are plenty of people out there who couldn't care less about the intracies of seniority-based transfer rules or merit pay, they just want to cut school spending and use the money to fund tax cuts for big corporations and rich people. That those policies should be opposed we can all agree.

Like Oil and Water?

Teachers Unions and Charter Schools--like oil and water, right? A new report from the National Charter School Research Project and the Progressive Policy Institute looks at what happened when the two organizations convened a group of charter and teachers union leaders at PPI. No, the building did not explode. But some common themes did emerge: Different metaphors and frames for viewing education issues mean both sides often find themselves talking past each other, and while leaders of both the charter and labor movements tend to view the other in light of its most extreme members, moderates within both movements actually share a lot of the same goals and views for what good schools should be like. And both movements could gain something of value from one another. It's a preliminary foray, but expect more action around this topic down the road.

The Lemons' Last Dance?

This summer, the Department of Education required states to include Equity Plans with their Highly Qualified Teachers Plans as part of NCLB compliance. Between the NCLB attention and groups like The Education Trust pushing the issue, teacher equity is increasingly becoming a top concern for states.

That’s why this California law, signed by Schwarzenegger on September 28^th, could be a harbinger of things to come. As states move to comply with the teacher equity provision of NCLB, they may look more closely at the impact of teacher transfer and hiring rules, especially if typical strategies like incentives, targeted recruitment, and mentoring are insufficient in addressing the teacher equity problem.

This law underscores the need for high quality and independent research on the "Dancing Lemons" issue - research that examines the real impact of collective bargaining on teacher quality relative to the impact of other important factors, such as working conditions and pay.

School cafeteria bake off!

No, don't run screaming! These ladies are SERIOUS, and it all sounds pretty tasty to me.

Honestly, though, it’s a nice reminder of the dedication of school employees, including the ones you don’t hear about in policy debates.

Why I Love Leo Casey

Read this post, in which Leo both weighs in on the homework debate and critiques Alfie Kohn's broader world view. I don't agree with everything Leo says, but he cuts to the heart of what's wrong with the debate that's often constructed between "rigor" and "authentic learning."

The Great "H" Debate

So, Ryan at Edspresso, Joe Williams, AFTie Michele and NYC Educator are engaged in a lively debate about whether or not public officials who have some responsibility for public education and send their kids to private schools are hypocrites. Several people also wrote to me and Tom about this issue in DC following our Post piece about the problems facing DCPS. I tend to react negatively to these kinds of arguments because I don't think it's fair to kids to use them as a debating props simply because you disagree with their parents.

It is disconcerting, however, when policymakers actively oppose efforts to give disadvantaged families access to better education options that the policymakers already enjoy. Something feels terribly insensitive when the person arguing that children from poor families must be forced to remain in crummy public schools, because allowing them to leave would hurt the public school system, is someone who has no similar compunctions about removing their own children from the same system. But I think Ryan has chosen the wrong thing to focus on here. The issue really isn't whether or not policymakers send their kids to public schools--even if policymakers do choose to send their kids to public schools, this still reflects a choice--a choice that disadvantaged families don't have.

This is also an issue I see playing out on a more personal level because many of my friends are people who work in education policy and care about public schools, but as the ones who live in DC are starting their families, they struggle with the issue of where to send their children to school: should they move to Virginia of Maryland? try to afford a home in one of the DC neighborhoods fortunate enough to be in a "good" school attendance area (and hope the lines don't change too much)? look into private schools? do any charter schools provide good enough options? I know many people who've found ways to craft a good education for their children from charters and options available in DCPS, but it requires effort, savvy, and in some cases a good bit of luck. These decisions have implications that extend beyond education because DC's civic and fiscal health and growth require it to retain stable, professional families. And it's hardly an issue unique to DC.

Finally, I want to disclose that this issue--should people in charge of public schools be required to send their children to those schools?--is one I have a somewhat unique perspective on, because, as readers know, I am the daughter of a public school principal. Because my dad's contracts required him to live in the school districts he worked for, in practice that meant my sister and I had to go to the high school of which my dad was principal. Fortunately for us, it was an excellent school. But it's not always easy having your dad for the principal, even when he's a good and popular principal and you love him a lot. I'm not complaining, but I think it's worth pointing out that sometimes there are good reasons for people who run public schools to choose not to send their kids to the schools they run, because being in a school your mom or dad's in charge of can have its own problems.

Diploma Mills? Or Something Else Altogether?

This month's installment of Education Sector's ever-popular "Charts You Can Trust" series describes the startlingly large number of doctorates in education being handed out by a trio of universities--two based in Florida--that provide most of their services to mid-career educators via distance learning and the Internet. (Thanks to This Week In Education for the link).

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Fort Lauderdale-based Nova Southeastern University granted 447 doctorates in education in 2005. To put that in perspective,that's three times as many as the university that granted the fourth-largest number of education doctorates, Teachers College at Columbia. It's fives times as many as the number 10 university, the University of Virginia.

It's tempting in discussions like this to start throwing around phrases like "diploma mill." But that would be unfair, primarily because schools of education generally do a terrible job of rating the quality of their programs and graduates in any kind of objective, comparable way. You can get a bad education in a traditional classroom and a good education via non-traditional means. Until established ed schools step up and demonstrate what they're really worth, speculation about quality-for-quantity tradeoffs at places like Nova remain just that: speculation.

That said, it's hard not to wonder what the degrees earned by the legions of new Nova doctors really signify. A friend of mine earned an Ed.D. from a top-ranked Ivy League school last year. It took her seven years--classes, teaching assistantships, lengthy dissertation written under the supervision of a well-respected researcher, the whole nine yards. I imagine her experience was so dissimilar to that of a typical Nova graduate that giving them both a degree with the same name is inaccurate in a fundamental way.

Perhaps that's what's really needed--more differention and variety in degree designation, so that everyone knows the difference between people who completed a classic doctoral program and those who simply completed a lengthy course of study. Without that--or objective, outcomes-based measures of program quality--we're sure to see further commodification of college degrees.

The Wire, Week Five -- Ain't Misbehavin'!

This week The Wire took us inside one of the toughest jobs you could ever have: establishing order and discipline in a middle school classroom. But there’s something making it much tougher in Prez’s case—the dismally low-level classroom assignments he’s asking students to complete and the depressingly low expectations that such assignments embody. (As Stephanie Robinson—one of the nation’s foremost experts on teaching and a principal partner at the Education Trust—often puts it, “The classroom assignments teachers give students are a very accurate proxy for exactly what and how much they expect students to learn.”)

However, as is often true of The Wire, you have to watch very carefully to catch all of this. For viewers with Tivo or some other way to pause the action, take a careful look at the worksheet the camera focuses on for a few seconds. It contains 20 numbers. The directions read, “Move the decimal point two (2) places to the left.” The objective of the worksheet is written at the top: “IDENTIFY THE LEFT DIRECTION.” Knowing how to move decimals is important, but odds are that that these thirteen-year-olds already know their left from their right. Even if Prez has a few who aren’t quite sure, there are better ways to teach it.*

It often seems paradoxical to non-educators, but mindless worksheets like that are actually more likely to cause kids to misbehave in class—and eventually to drop out of school—than challenging assignments. At one point Prez asks Michael why he’s not working on the problems: “Come on, this is easy. I know you can do it.” The look on Michael’s face tells us everything we need to know about the relationship between student behavior and academic expectations: We need to give students something to behave for if we want them to work hard and take school seriously.

* Put your hands in front of your face, palms outward. Point your thumbs at each other. The hand that makes an “L” shape is your left.

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

School Safety Summit

What Catherine and Leo said. Seriously, as Alexander Russo points out, recent tragic events notwithstanding, school violence rates are down, and schools are actually among the safer places kids can be. (And while you're there, check out the Colbert Report clips)